159. The Long Haul

I done a bad bad thing last night: started Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), but couldn't bring myself to finish it. I tried, I really did. But--as I confessed in my Altman in memoriam last November, "As the '70s circus rolled on, I found myself missing his bulls'-eyes [such as Nashville], instead lingering on the ones that sometimes seemed like feature-length outtakes fiercely proud that no one was watching ... ." I went on to observe, "The Altman I held was one slippery fish, either too big to hold on to or too ugly to handle. I didn't always love his movies, but I did always want to see them," concluding that "after a while, it seemed I didn't need Nashville and company." Ahem. For once I wasn't lying, not even to me.

Of course, I feel bad about leaving Nashville so soon, giving it only thirty minutes or so; but, as my wife announced, "If it's going to go on like this for another two hours, I'm leaving." So maybe a part of me was trying to please a fellow viewer--but no; I cannot keep living an Altman-esque lie: It wasn't my wife, or the hour, or the relative humidity. It was the movie, just too annoying, an exercise in the incidental and the underwhelming, with a blaring condescension toward all those twanging hicks.

And despite the fact that I'm sure I missed plenty, that last crack tells me something more important than any clear, critical response I can muster: I simply waited too long to see it. Back in 1975, when I was a freshman in college, I probably would've loved every moment. I'm the guy who saw Buffalo Bill and the Indians twice, a movie that critiques American history and identity as subtly as a Robert Crumb cartoon explores sexuality. But that's no insult: I still love Crumb, too--but even more so in 1975, I might argue, if only because such loud wet razzberries sprayed over the blinking face of that idiot America were so damn satisfying back then. My literary heroes were Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Breakfast of Champions) and Hunter S. Thompson (pick yer favorite Fear and/or Loathing); and Harlan Ellison made all kinds of sense simply because he edited SF anthologies with the words "dangerous" and "visions" in their titles; and National Lampoon magazine's and Saturday Night Live's nastiest swipes seemed not only hilarious but perfectly reasonable. I was a card-carrying member, all right--and I admit I still am, sort of; but ... What? Why couldn't I finish Nashville last night?

Somewhere or other (I think it was in a book of sayings about getting older that was given to me when I turned forty--the title, I believe, was When You Consider the Alternative ... , and featured a cemetery on the cover)--someone said, "Life is a continual process of becoming tired." Is it that simple? Again, as my wife, an elementary-school teacher, explained, "I hear this kind of thing all day at work [overlapping talk punctuated by shouts and mutters]; I don't want it in a movie." Oh, the geezerdom of it all! We were both becoming tired--and does that mean, Best Beloveds, that we are simply, properly alive? Is it fitting and just to be annoyed by a Robert Altman movie?

I'm afraid so. But even as I pressed the EJECT button I promised I would one day return to Nashville, if only to see what else Shelley Duvall was going to wear--I searched online (without success) to share an image of her, frighteningly thin (Keith Carradine's character observes, "You stay on that diet, honey, and it's gonna kill you."), with short shorts and gigantic platform shoes, Olive Oyl's body and Astro Boy's feet. And Henry Gibson was great, as always, and I know there's a Really Big Show to look forward to. But last night, Nashville felt like Howard Hawks without a plot, and while Altman's rakish take on the midpoint of that fullt-tilt gonzo decade may be pitch-perfect, I was too, um, alive to handle such a high and strident tone. Maybe some Saturday morning; that time of day on that day of the week has always been bright and alert for me--cartoon time, of course, perhaps the best venue for Nashville's Dixie calliope cavalcade.

158. Departed

For years now I have kept in my head a memory of an editorial in Famous Monsters of Filmland in which Forrest J. Ackerman, writing to parents, insists his magazine is not the source of its child-readers' anxieties, that the actual blame for nervous tykes goes, of course, to the real world of the early 1960s, a duck-and-cover nightmare that tops any fright the rubber-masked creepy-crawlers of Horrorwood could ever stir up. I don't know where this editorial appears--if it does at all; still, I have an image of it in my head, the text accompanied by, naturally, a patented grainy FM black-and-white photo of a mushroom cloud, wide as Mr. Sardonicus' grin, dingy as a gravedigger's gloves.

Faithful readers of this site will attest to my penchant for discussing the delicious thrill of cinematic scares, the typical Boomer caress over the pulp surface of memories of Saturday matinees gone by, the--I will admit--self-indulgent gushing over low-budget Gothicism, from Tinglers to Saucer-Men, from Basil Wolverton to Frank Frazetta. And I will also admit this can grow a bit silly--and yet: since starting this paragraph I wandered over to Wikipedia to check up on various of these dark corners--E.C. Comics, Creepy and Eerie magazines--and five minutes in their company was enough to soften my disdain, even to retrieve my fond admiration.

What is going on here? In part, it is simply my heart--"dark and drifting, and unsatisfied" (to misappropriate a Springsteen line)--trying to lay it all out; but in arranging everything there in front of me I linger, and recall, and won't let go, until I have once again written myself into reconciliation with the solitary pleasures of a monster-ridden life.

Which brings me back to Forry Ackerman and the (imagined?) editorial. I was watching Moonlight Mile (2002), in which a young man (Jake Gyllenhaal), his fiancee newly murdered--while he continues to live with his would-have-been-future in-laws (Susan Sarandon and Dustin Hoffman)--must cope with their shared loss--and the secret he keeps: that he had broken off the engagement days before her murder. As Joe wears his early-'70s mourning suit and slips half-consciously into his father-in-law's determination for them still to go into the commercial real estate business together ("and Son" already added to the sign), he does his best to hide away and take care of Ben and his writer wife, Jojo. But his self is forced into uneasy sleep and he struggles to fall in love with a local woman (Ellen Pompeo), whose own fiance is MIA in Vietnam. On the surface it is an indie soaper, but Joe's short-of-breath posture and frozen smile brought me up short: I knew that feeling, the only one required to keep it together, while my own dearly departed, still alive back there in the mid-'60s, as real as Forry Ackerman's mushroom cloud--realer, right there in my house--haunted me more every year, until I began to see myself as a lonely boy about to become a lonely man. Now there's something to be afraid of.

And as I stumbled, peering in the dimness of adolescence in 1971, I think I may have looked a little like Joe, realizing I was surrendering to others' pain and loss--my mother sicker every year, my father finding less and less work, our almost-middle-class life balanced at the edge of what looked to be a long, ugly drop. So watching Moonlight Mile I was able to hear that clock-in-cotton muffled heartbeat under the floorboards, the guilt unwarranted, but the deed still done, the Joycean dead haunting every muscle as I tried to make one simple lifting motion--but man it was heavy, if I may sound like the early '70s.

At the end, as Joe and Jojo look up at the camera, I could hardly look back, at last happy for them (and for me), the car for one and her typewriter for the other at last moving, getting somewhere, going home; and even though broken things persist--the daughter was shot in a "family restaurant" across the street from her father's business, and the window remains boarded up (until at the end Ben plunks a fifty on the counter, 90 cents for the ice-cream cone and the change for a new window)--and the promises of the past can become threats--Ben's office is on one of those Main Streets that commercial real estate developers like him killed in the '80s--you can still turn away every once in a while, and look up and smile. As Jojo tells Joe, "You find your home, and it may not be what you thought--you know; color's off, style's wrong ... but there it is anyway and to hell with you if you can't take a joke." Movies keep wanting us to "learn about loss," as DeNiro's Max Cady intones, his voice gritty as a dustcloud, but Moonlight Mile bestows the blessing of learning how to lose and come out of it alive, in one home or another.

157. "I'm the boss, I'm the boss, I'm the boss, I'm the boss ... "

So, for the second time, the Pharisees summoned the man who had been blind and said: "Speak the truth before God. We know this fellow is a sinner."
"Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know, the man replied. "All I know is this: Once I was blind and now I can see."

--John IX: 24-26

156. Hollywoodtown

(I haven't read fifteen words in a row about Hollywoodland (2006), so I once again permit myself to indulge, in titular humility, my blissful ignorance.)

Something about Hollywoodland kept my attention--more: Made me lean toward it, eager to allow it to move like a Philip Marlowe stroll down those mean streets, not only to dead ends but dead men themselves, "heavier than broken hearts," as Marlowe cracks wise somewhere in The Big Sleep. While lowlife private dick Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) looks closer and closer at the bad things--and gazes off into the middle distance where worse ones lurk--and as George Reeves (Ben Affleck), weighted down by his Superman costume, strums his blue guitar and bids adios before accepting a final naked kiss--punctuated by a splatter-pattern, over and over--I moved even closer to the slowly familiar world director Allen Coulter was making.

Or was that re-making? Where had I seen this before? Of course, one noir's bound to look like another--and that's OK; originality is not as welcome as we'd like to insist it is, at least not when we're at the movies, where the succession of images must at once surprise and fulfill; can I refer to it as "the familiar reborn"? It's Chaplin always wearing the baggy pants and skittering around corners and peering just so at some everyday injustice before taking decisive action; but each time he does so he must work subtle changes to the routine, both satisfying our need for comfort through repetition [1] as well as re-animating our interest. So Hollywoodland's mere devotion to noir wasn't exactly the source of my latest bout of cinema deja vu. No, a melody I already knew was being covered here, and the more I listened to the tune--with just enough vibrato and a hint of down-the-corridor echo to the horns--the clearer it grew.

Of course, the song was straight out of Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), with certain added touches here and there that Hollywoodland provided for its own arrangement. I must admit to being a bit slow on the uptake, because the moment of clarity occurred for me late in the picture. Simo (and isn't that as silly a name as Nicholson's "Gittes"?) has been, in a satisfying, duly-noted noir manner, beaten both physically and psychically, driven down by chains to the face (not quite a knife to the nostril, but still too close for both detectives' comfort) and by the tawdry details of the case; and the weary acceptance of his complicity in the mess he has stirred up saps him into sleep, rest for the weary at last--and then the phone rings, and he winces and touches the chain-marks, and slogs on. This also happens to Gittes, ready to put his watery mystery aside, his pajamas cool and his bed inviting--but sleep is out of the question, because venality and loss never rest, so why should the yeggs who trail after?

Hollywoodland is full of such points of contact, from its ripe colors to its mournful soundtrack, from its twisted sexuality to the deep but distant sound one makes when falling into conspiracy's well. But it adds something Chinatown considers only with the most jaundiced of eyes: parenthood. For Polanski's movie, parents and their children are the cause of the problem; in Hollywoodland, they emerge as the solution. Here, the detective matters as much as the dead man; and while we are shown Reeves in extensive and varied flashbacks and what-ifs that compose one of the film's two poles, the pull of the other grows stronger, until the focus of the film becomes Simo and his child. Simo is divorced, with a Leave-It-to-Beaver son who burns up his Superman costume--on the living room sofa, no less--in mute protest over the death of his hero [2]. Simo is as puzzled by this as he is over Reeves' death; and as the movie goes on, trying to solve the second mystery solves the first.

Reeves is also a son, his ghost haunted by his mother [3], still alive and determined to enshrine her superhero--without affection, it seems, and without mourning. Reeves is cut loose from all bonds, both personal and professional; and to expose us to the pain of this unmooring, Affleck gives the performance of his career in a role he seemed meant to play: an affable cipher who knows it, and knows he can fight it for only so long [4]. Reeves gets sadder and sadder, our washed-up double, the Sad Sack/Clark Kent we suspect we might be, once the wrong cards are dealt.

Our sympathy for Reeves is interestingly filtered through Simo's growing attraction--at first to the moolah, then to the point of honor it represents for him, finally to something more, as Simo, down there at the bottom of the shamus barrel, digs deep for a truth that will make him seem real, to his son and himself. Chinatown may be closer to noir's unhappy heart, cynicism masking the loss, hysteria driving the denouement. But in Coulter's picture the losses are a given, and the dead man tells enough tales into Simo's ear that the detective is able to pry himself free of the mystery and leave it unsolved. Throughout the picture we get different views of Reeves' death. The trite facts do not change, but sometimes it's one murderer, sometimes another. Finally, though, Simo can stand in front of Reeves' house one more time and see it as "simple" suicide, and reconcile with himself for having been so much like Reeves' mother at the start, so that he eventually can become something his son needs.

The film's last shot is of Simo approaching his son--but there is no embrace, no swell of violins letting us know everything will turn out. It seems enough that this strange noir narrows the focus at the end just enough to let Reeves be, and to make a step toward something else. Before Simo visits the house that last time, he watches a test reel of Reeves proving to his would-be pro-wrestling backers that he can hack it. It is a grainy, jumpy whisper of another '50s tale of loss, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and as Reeves poses and rolls in his yard, his attitude game but his face betraying a grimace (earlier, he had been injured in a car accident), we can tell that nothing's left. With a final broad stroke of the true noir brush, Simo becomes Reeves' only friend, almost an alter-ego. Or perhaps they both realize they have been Clark Kent all along, driving one to oblivion and the other to reconciliation.


I will not push too hard for the Simo-as-Clark-Kent version; just let me point to the only truly significant moment in the Kill Bill movies, when Bill describes Kent as the imposter, noting that the other superheroes start out as puny Peter Parkers but become super, while Superman's true self is the hero, with Kent merely endured so that Superman can be himself. It is as close as Tarantino gets to a moral concept, one that implies the price you pay for long journeys: You can as easily become an exile as an explorer. In Hollywoodland, both Reeves and Simo pass through this Purgatory of identity; and, sentimental dope that I am, I refuse to leave either of them entirely in the flames. The movie ends with a long, drawn-out sigh--and I think that was me, keeping my fingers crossed that at least one of them gets a chance to wash up and go home. Reeves' girlfriend, Toni Mannix (her real name; noir may be less fictional than we think), [5] tells him, "Nobody ever asks to happy later," but it seems that Simo, at least, is willing to wait.

---

[1] As our best fiend, Freud, puts it, the urge toward order is simply a manifestation of "the compulsion to repeat."

[2] When his show was cancelled, Reeves also burns his Superman outfit--in the backyard bar-b-que--but with relief.

[3] After a fall while filming an episode of his TV series, Reeves jokes, "I'd like to thank the Academy and the good folks of Galesburg, Illinois, without whom all this would not have been possible." Once again, our fair town is immortalized in the movies--more than you'd think, if you do at all. According to Wikipedia, Reeves' mother was born in Galesburg, although George grew up in Woolstock, Iowa. In the film, his mother arrives by train, presumably from Galesburg. The details of her whereabouts at the time are not clear for me, but all I care about is that Hollywoodland joins that Honor Roll of Movies That Mention Galesburg, the Shining Rail-Gem of the Midwest.

[4] There's another story here in the easy conflation of Affleck and Reeves, producing a kind of brother-son faced with his own tabloid-typecasting, able to reveal himself only as Superman, "a strange visitor from another world," and no kidding. Again, Affleck's performance is a sad and beautiful thing, as he uses Reeves to show us what's been done to him.

[5] And before I forget, Mannix is played with always-true tones by that beautiful person, Diane Lane.

155. Rating Game Redux 5: Love's Labours Recycled

I am a terrible terrible person, a lazy lazy man. There; repeating things twice not only makes them so, but makes them go away. So now I can (a) follow up on the previous musical posting while (b) foisting off stuff I've already done for my local paper and wife, in that order, if I may be discreet.

The most recent Ratings Game list is "Best Love Songs." As usual, one may be the loneliest number, but three remains the toughest; still, here it is:

"My Funny Valentine"
A breathless ode to passion in the light of human imperfection (first sung on screen by Judy Garland to Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms/1939), this song asserts everyone can love and be loved. It always "makes me smile in my heart," especially Chet Baker's cover, although Elvis Costello risks a go and almost succeeds.

"Stardust"
On the other hand, what to sing when love fades? Hoagy Carmichael claims the melody came to him all at once, like a gift, while he was walking down a street in Bloomington, Indiana. There’s actually a plaque at the site--and well there should be. Wikipedia reports over 1800 recordings, and Mitchell Parish's lyrics guarantee that this "memory of love’s refrain" will continue as long as lovers continue to part. The definitive cover is impossible to name, although Nat "King" Cole may win by default; still, I'm partial to Willie Nelson's minimalist take.

"I Put a Spell on You"
As good as The Police's "Every Breath You Take" and Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" may be in capturing obsession's wide-eyed grimace, this tune, definitively covered by the unhinged Screamin' Jay Hawkins as a voodoo-blues creep-out, nails love's worst impulses like a coffin lid: "I don’t care if you don't want me, I'm yours anyhow." Yikes.

Honorable Mentions: "All You Need Is Love," "Blue Moon," "September Song," "Love and Happiness," "A Kiss to Build a Dream On," "Brown-Eyed Girl," "Besame Mucho," "All Is Full of Love," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"

And on a personal note: Every year I put together a Valentine's CD for my wife--although now that she has an iPod, is such a cumbersome method of transmittal obsolete? I hope not: It's too much fun finding silly cover art.*

This year it's Two for the Road; and here's the playlist:

Give The Girl A Kiss/Bruce Springsteen
Sea Cruise/Rico
We're Going to Be Friends/The White Stripes
Sea Of Love/Phil Phillips & The Twilights
Reet Petite (The Sweetest Girl In Town)/Jackie Wilson
Why/David Byrne
Vision Of Love/Explorers
Secret Love/Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban
All Of Me/Willie Nelson
Linger In My Arms A Little Longer, Baby/Peggy Lee
Touch Of Loving/Bobby Sykes
Pennies from Heaven/Louis Prima
Breathe/The Silent League
Tango/坂本龍一 (that's all I can tell you)
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes/The Platters
Girl From Ipanema/Stan Getz
Au Fond Du Temple Saint/David Byrne
Sweet Love On My Mind/Jimmy & Johnny
Sweet Nothin's/Brenda Lee
Fleeting Smile/Roger Eno
Here, There And Everywhere/The Beatles
My One And Only Love/Chet Baker
The Best Is Yet To Come/Nancy Wilson
Take Me Home/Crystal Gayle
Two for the Road/Bruce Springsteen

Aw; now ain't that cute.

So forgive me my lack of industry; let's just live in the love, my funny valentines. Besides, "There's nothing you can do that can't be done."

And last but never least: Happy Birthday, dear Mimi. Happy Birthday to--who? You. (Beeg kees, leettle kees, leettle kees, leettle hug, beeg hug, beeg kees.)

---

*Both images in this posting come from James Lileks' site; I provide a link to it from this blog. So thanx and a tippo to my favorite boomer web-attic, with deconstructions. (Sometimes, late at night, when the matchbooks are all ironed and the Bubble-Duds folded neatly away, I swear I can still hear the distant calling of Meat! Meat! Meat!)

154. Just Play

I'll admit it: Film is not merely a gazing game. Sometimes I hear things, a tune I can't get out of my head--but in a good way, a beloved melody--OK, "unchained"; and any key I want it in, it sustains.

Better yet, listen to this:

I would sit, seven years old in 1964, in my rocking chair--that's right, Boomers, like JFK, just gone; and what's left? Meet the Beatles, spinning over and over, that perfect A side--"I Want To Hold Your Hand," "I Saw Her Standing There," "This Boy," "It Won't Be Long," "All I've Got to Do," "All My Loving"--then flipside--"Don't Bother Me," "Little Child," "Till There Was You," "Hold Me Tight," "I Wanna Be Your Man," "Not a Second Time"--and I'd deejay the album, talking fast between tracks--then be The Beatles themselves (Paul, mostly, obviously)--my hair pushed down on my forehead, almost mop-topped, my eyes straining up to catch a glimpse of it--singing every song, alone in the corner of the living room with the record player, sotto voce joy deep in my heart.

How much fun was it to be a Beatle? We thought we knew, until they really showed us, almost right away, in A Hard Day's Night, released the same year as that first "official" Beatles album. I don't recall if I saw the movie in 1964, but of course have run into it a number of times over the years; and the older I get the more sentimental my smile at their beaming faces, flushed with being The Beatles, glad simply to be there. John winking at us like Bugs Bunny, whatever script and structure just something for him to fiddle with and happily confound, his nose stuck against the Coke bottle--get it!--and Ringo telling the reporter he's neither mod nor rocker but mocker--get it!--and George observing Ringo's pile of fan mail--"He's got a large family"--get it!--and Paul insisting that his grandfather is clean, and we get it--or we'd like to. It's The Beatles, though, who really do, all of it, and we're happy simply to watch them getting it. I saw it again a week or so ago, and sometimes had to look away, foolish and misty-eyed; getting soft. John and George gone, two of all things that must pass; but for a few minutes there Richard Lester followed them around as they sported in his movie, real mixers, in black and white, the way I picture Penny Lane and the last light slanting along Abbey Road.

And can I bear one of these days to watch Let It Be, filmed just six years after we'd met The Beatles and already down that long and winding road? Today, six years doesn't seem like much, but the Beatles came when I was seven and went was I was thirteen--and that is a long time, if I may indulge in gross understatement. From genuine little kid to the first year of high school--from toting around my Johnny Seven gun, posing with my cousin Ed in front of the flag in our front yard--and sent home early from school (like every other little kid in America) to find my mother crying in front of the TV over what happened in Dallas, November suddenly cold all over that day--to one last afternoon in eighth grade when I pulled out my toy soldiers to play Army and found myself suddenly bored, and knew there was no turning back; Gomer Pyle couldn't fool me anymore, just because he was the only jarhead in the whole damn country who never had to ship out. We were all tuned in by 1970, whether we knew it or not.

So I'll let myself strain a little under the weight of A Hard Day's Night's hand-held, long-gone spree. I sang those songs the whole time first go around, then started again--after having tossed them out for a few years, in college; and looking back, I wonder how desolate something must've been for me to have had enough of them. But they wouldn't go away; they were too surprised by joy--and maybe self-aware and even almost already jaded, but still ready to chuck it all for a giggle in a joint surging with girls--and John exults, "Please sir, sir, can I have one to surge me sir, please sir?" and he has only sixteen years left, so why not? Plenty of hard days to go around from 1964 to 1970 (and so on), and everyone deserves a dash and a romp before the house lights go up.

153. Play and Pay, concluded

Lindsay Crouse in House of Games (1987) seems made almost of wax, the kind Madame Tussaud worked into eerie similitude. Grand old Wikipedia tells us that during the French Revolution Tussaud fashioned death masks of prominent victims of another Madame, la Guillotine, having searched through corpses to find the decapitated heads she needed. Two centuries later, Crouse emerges from the Mamet-ian shadows with the same relentless dedication, her own head intact--or is it?--the surfaces of her face curving in cool detachment and butter-yellow melancholy, eyes widening as the sly ecstasy of the game takes her--well, into its confidence, if I may play with the phrase, and draws her to her true self.

I have watched this movie three or four times over the years, and until this last viewing what always struck me were two things--no, three, if you count Joe Mantegna's Mike, one of those performances I find dismaying because they lead me into the covetous yearning to discard for a while my threadbare self and wear his, like a good suit; but I digress. Again, two things:

(1) The sheer fun of learning the cons, the vicarious vice indulged, the smugness of sleight-of-hand. Watch Mike standing alone, no audience, making the coin disappear, to understand the egoism of the act, the wise guy lording it over everyone--or nobody; doesn't matter, as long as you can do the trick. But the con is also like gambling, until you're part card sharp, part close-up magician; the best of two bad worlds.

(2) The prim sexiness of Crouse's Margaret Ford, starched into late-'80s power-wear, but also somehow burgeoning, like an arbor. I'm not sure if it's her posture or her mouth--or better yet, her eyes, at once flat and vivid; a watching face. In any case, to me she seemed a piece of fruit, except--you guessed it--wax.

And now, watching her one more time, I see the mannequin move, and the grapes spill out, but rotten. How could I have missed it, her predatory half-smile, her mouth slightly parted, smeared by a handful of Deadly Sins? Mike caught it right away, Margaret's "tell," but he didn't realize how feral she was, how simply compelled, a creature of instinctual desires. Pure Mamet, in some ways, given his reputation for female characters who seem more projections of fears rather than dramatic personae. But in House of Games there is a sadness mixed in with Crouse's inscrutable glances; Margaret is nothing but guilt without a sense of itself, an amoral animated figure watching in a mirror the simple movements of its eyes and arms.

This is the House of Wax, then, and getting in costs plenty, at least this time around for me, as I felt my earlier impressions of the film like a faint draft on the back of my neck while I walked into this new room, where Margaret pockets small personal things, just as Mike had told her--but now it seems more like Biff Loman stealing that fountain pen, sad recompense for having to be so pleased with oneself, a life as a con, all games and no winner. In the final shot of her in the film Margaret has to be content with a slight movement of her mouth in a gesture so secretive that I cannot know, watching her one more time, whether she's tasting corruption in the back of her throat or merely suppressing a last laugh.

152. Rating Game Redux 4: Winners, Schminners

Just a quick and lazy posting:

The Oscar nominees were announced today, so I figured now's as good as time as any to unload yet another unpublished best-of local newspaper list, "Best Movies of 2006." (I submitted a little late, beat out by someone, a nice person in many respects, who nonetheless listed V for Vendetta among 2006's best. Are we still in the game? as one might ask in eXistenZ; 'fraid we are.) I will admit that (1) I didn't see many movies in the theater last year--I know, I know: despite the fact I can get in for free because one of my daughters regularly can be seen at our local octoplex wearing a bowtie and sweeping popcorn--and (2) these are really "favorite" rather than "best" movies. But here you go:

The Departed
Martin Scorsese proves once again that he is simply the best living American director, with a ferocious love of cinema matched only by the full-tilt performances he draws from his actors.

Rocky Balboa
An amazing accomplishment: Stallone induces audience-amnesia, allowing us to forget all those Rocky sequels, leaving us with a fond memory of 1976 and a new movie made up of sentiment, loss, and self-deprecating humor--as well as Stallone’s patented brick-wall uplift, absolutely. And remember: "It ain't how hard you hit; it's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward."

Little Miss Sunshine
How does a story about drug addiction, monomania, attempted suicide, and sundry dysfunctions become the feel-good movie of the year? Simple: Just make sure that "No one gets left behind." In its own way, as filled with pity and love as Stallone’s movie.

---

Photo found on China View (www.chinaview.cn): "A person passes by models of the Oscar statue on sale in Hollywood in Los Angeles, the United States, Feb. 23, 2005. (Xinhua Photo/Qi Heng)" No doubt. But hey: Isn't that third one from the left in the second row Joseph Schildkraut's Best Supporting Actor award for The Life of Emile Zola? J'accuse!

151. Play and Pay, continued

"Flow my tears," the policeman said, running along the blade, scanning darkly. And how heavy the feeling was, like taking something made of poison--but not at first, just a little less breath and a weight on my chest, so that I find it--well, not difficult to move, just incidental to being right where I am.

And where am I? It seems small but free, like the high stool on which a Nowhere Man could sit, making his plans for nobody--except I'm lying down, one leg dangling, the foot on the floor, the couch scratchy on my forearms, my t-shirt bunching up beneath me, and the house quiet, while the traffic shivers outside, like small waves breaking. And the TV kept on, excited voices turned down but insistent, whittling at something until it becomes something else. So I crack one then two eyes open and see the flat familiar shapes on the screen sliding a little, like plate tectonics sped up--each million years a half-second, the jitter from millennia to millennia no longer discernible--and it's faces and cars and trees--and more faces, some dull, some shifty, all bearing down on whatever's in front of them--except some slip and shift forever, scrambled disguises, masks and altered tones until no one knows who's who. An undercover world.

And not quite real, rotoscoped and morphed, cartoons. Finally! some truth there on the screen, a cartoon at last. And they're all on something, "D" for Death, hilarious on the way down, until it's all bugs and funny looks from bystanders. And everyone I see is on the hit-list: Keanu and Winona, Woody, Junior and Rory, and even Philip. They keep remembering to swallow, and down they go--until, alone in the field, the second harvest peeks up, down there where the cornstalks meet the loam. And I quote:

"What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better, because if the scanner sees only darkly the way I do, then I'm cursed and cursed again."

But now I'm no longer on that couch, I'm on my own, and I see him, bending down; it is a moment without murk, almost joy--certainly relief, certainly one little piece of what should be--and he plucks a present for his friends at Thanksgiving. Almost death, then, but taken up and tucked away. And this gave me the strength to look it up, and one Frank C. Bertrand reminded me of something M.H. Abrams mentions about the Romantics in Natural Supernaturalism:

"Whether a man shall live his old life or a new one, in a universe of death or of life, cut off and alien or affiliated and at home, in a state of servitude or of genuine freedom ... all depends on his mind as it engages with the world in the act of perceiving."

Arctor loses his old life to live the new, plays and almost loses--maybe; we leave him in servitude with a chance of freedom slipped in his sock. I can see him, a clear and cleanly drawn object, flat and right there against the glass wall of my TV, breaking my heart at the thought of the way all that high-strung fun gets torn out of their heads by the absolute roots of it all. I'd laughed plenty, then knew it was time to turn over, curl up a little, cry over that long list of lost boys and girls. But the movie makes a little quavery toodle, like a theremin approached, and I smile at the spooky half-gift and almost-promise.

150. Play and Pay

Watching, while they lasted, the quick-jump joys of Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962)--as the two friends (Oskar Werner and Henri Serre) raced through their early adulthood, straight into World War I (on opposite sides) and the arms of the mad Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), where they held tight, released, and held again, squeezing until all breath was expelled--I was rueful in my assessment, if I may use so dull a phrase. On the one hand I envied their mad rush: They were using their strength while they had it, trying everything once--and finding much of it (some version or another of) good, running like children who whip their heads back and forth as they fly, heedless of destination, the terrain a veering blur, heads aching and mouths open in grins that refuse to become grimaces--but do, and that's the other hand: Senseless to the end, they dash toward their dooms; as Jim notes succinctly--always so, almost abrupt, whether in foolish whim or sudden certainty: "We played with life and lost."

I both yearned for and was appalled by the reckless course they run. I myself lived a much different third decade, having internalized an eminently useful yet--or should I say "and necessarily"?--deflating rule: If I do this or that now, what will "this or that" in turn do to me in ten years? Imagine being twenty and always caretaking some emerging thirty-year-old; one would have little time for one's current self, that unformed charge demanding so much, in silence but firm. Of course, sometimes I ignored my duties; but mostly I stopped, let the others make their pell-mell way, and stood--well, to rescue some pride let's say high on the windy hilltop, like a scout suddenly spotting a suspicious rustle--while less pensive heads rolled on, dizzy with the speed of their descent. So here I am, watching Jules et Jim, safe--thanks to that careful fellow thirty years ago--but again, sometimes rueful that I did not look up from the meticulous cataloguing of Needful Things to jump and be damned.

Then again, it worked. At twenty-four--after jerking around like a badly made tin toy,* mooning over one safely unattainable prize after another--thirteen days after I met my incredibly-soon-to-be wife, I asked her to marry me. We were both stunned, and I was not sure if I had thwarted my plans for the decade-away me--or whether after all I ever had any plans, just a hidden but essential impulse, and tried it out for sure that once--saving all untrammelled joy for one quick leap--and found out that if you take off just right, the ground does not rush up at you, but you almost become the air you're falling through, like Alice down the rabbit-hole, able to pluck from the shelves this and that as you go--and in the end it isn't falling, merely arriving. And so I have been arriving for the past twenty-five years--ahead of schedule, so to speak--and still playing with life, neither winning nor losing, but nonetheless in the game. It's a silly thing, but true: If you're lucky enough to have a roof over your head and meals in front of you and some measure of health, you are free enough to lose only when you quit. Catherine quits, because life will not let her play her particular game any more: She's been at it too long without a decisive move; so, like everything else in Jules et Jim, she loses quickly, with a look, a racing hurtle, and a fall.

Once again I've written myself into--I will not say for certain whether it is the truth or a reconciliation; maybe some of both, but mostly I've cast off my rue without plunging, but still loving Jules' et Jim's et Catherine's first high capering kicks, a part of me always playing, despite the fact that I'm not so much in the game as making it up as I go along, at long last letting the years do as they will, no longer ill at ease over the next move.

---

*Credit Where Credit Is Due Dept.: I have, ah, appropriated this simile from the final "British" chapter of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, in which Alex, "cured all right," sees his old droog Pete, now married, "very nice, very pleasant, you know. Harmless"; and Alex, "both very very tired and also full of tingly energy," begins to see himself as another "clockwork"--this one, though, has no purpose or direction, but is "like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines." Alex concludes it is necessary: "And so it would itty on to like the end of the world, round and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself (by courtesy of Korova Milkbar) turning and turning and turning a vonny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers." Alex's job, you see, is to become a real orange, all clockworks sprung, despite the "terrible grahzny vonny world."

149. Merrie Olde Woodie

I remember seeing Truman Capote on a talk show back in the '70s--Johnny Carson?--talking about Tennessee Williams' slipped reputation. Maybe Capote hadn't yet felt the full weight of In Cold Blood on his own career--or maybe he had, and Williams was just the beard--but I can still see Capote's insistent posture as he scolded the critical establishment for what he saw as a denigration of Williams via a sniping chorus of what-have-you-done-for-us-latelys. He asserted this would not happen to such a figure in France, that the French cherish their artists, that one such play as Williams wrote in his prime would be enough to enshrine the artist forever.

Well, so long after the fact I won't argue with Capote's assessment of French cultural loyalty; but I was--and still am--in complete accord with his impatience toward short memories and voracious appetites. Capote was right: a masterpiece is a masterpiece, a Golden Age never tarnishes, and if Williams never rose to later heights, the early and mid ones are still much more than simply enough.

Harumph.

Which leads me to Woody Allen. I feel like Capote when I think of the treatment he's received over the past decade. And by all quarters, not just the yodeling hyenas of the Media Press, having to sustain their Entertainments, both Tonight and Weekly, with whatever perpetual-motion machine they can cobble together. The Woody's-washed-up contraption clatters away upstairs and down, as though no one ever watched Manhattan or Crimes and Misdemeanors, Annie Hall or Sweet and Lowdown. I was Capote-ish in my chagrin when everybody allowed themselves both to gush over Match Point as well as slap him on the sinister side by "hailing" the film as a "return to form."

Sorry, closet cinephobes--so often disguised as movie-mavens or pundits, to me just a collective bowl of cold mush--but he's never been away, just running through various costume changes. I'm still smiling from his Match Point companion piece, that other Anglo-Saxon attitude, Scoop. Part Manhattan Murder Mystery, part Broadway Danny Rose, with a whisper of Manhattan and an occasional nod toward Woody-trails-along pictures like Mighty Aphrodite, Scoop fits into his career as comfortably as just about everything he's done. And who wants more from a filmmaker, and who would want to be anything more? Woody's 30+ movies are remarkably consistent for me, all springing from a post-'50s, middle-browed, buttoned-down-mind, as ready to spin a yarn as ruminate over a subtlety. I'm much happier simply comparing one Allen picture with another than one "Woody Allen" with another. We've been trying to commodify him for three decades or so, and the effort to package a one-Woody-fits-all seems to me infinitely less important, engaging, or simply entertaining than leaving him alone and letting him show us something every year.

And like Capote with Williams I'm willing to let Woody's masterpieces inform the doodles--and not to let one diminish the other. Life's too short--and I wanted to type, "and so's Allen"; let's just say, there's only one Woody Allen, and I'd rather treat him the way Danny Rose handled his audience: spluttering, sometimes befuddled, sometimes appalled, but always plugging away, asking for ages and Zodiac signs, smiling enough to keep us at bay and in our seats--where I'm staying until he tells me he's done.

148. "Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three."

Note: This counts as Rating Game Redux 3

Our local paper's latest open call for best-of lists is "Best Movie Directors." As always, we can list only three. ("Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out." Sorry; I had to finish it.) I like the restriction; it leaves one with a haiku-sharp sense of economy, plus the anguish of having left out so many more. I'm not sure if my picks and commentary are going to make it (my word count is a bit high this time around) so I will not waste--wanting is always another matter--but post them here. Argue all you like; I'll probably agree with you. (Yes, I'm talking to you, you

Truffaut
Bergman
Ozu
Coppola
Wilder
Lean
Ford
Renoir
Chaplin
Hitchcock
Kubrick
Kurosawa

-o-philes; you're as right as could be. Especially the last three. Of course.)

Martin Scorsese
In the bomb-detonation business it's called a "controlled explosion": the bomb goes off, but only after the experts shoot at it or set off another bomb next to it or deflect the force of the explosion. This pretty much describes a Scorsese picture, as he manipulates the most incendiary human impulses with a master’s sure touch (and a mad bomber's glee), placing his actors--and us--just enough in harm's way to feel the heat of the blast but emerge in one piece (more or less).

Orson Welles
He made the best movie ever, then was punished for it the rest of his life. Prometheus, yes, but he invited his curse, and the tantalizing ruins he left behind--The Magnificent Ambersons, Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin, The Trial—as well as the still-standing monuments--The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil--serve as remnants of an alternate movie-civilization in which Welles ruled, self-indulgent, -centered, and -satisfied, but never boring.

Federico Fellini
From his first film, Variety Lights (1950), to his last, Intervista (1987), Fellini calls our attention to a central truth of cinema: it is the most dream-like of the arts--that is, if one’s dreams are wish-fulfillments of cinema itself, watched in the dark but bathed in the glow of human memory and artifice, an imitation of "Action!" richer than the action itself. One part Da Vinci, one part P.T. Barnum, a master of mirror-writing and divine hokum, Fellini was God's jester, reminding Him that even forbidden fruit doesn't fall far from the Tree.

147. Rating Game Redux 2: Christmas Cavalcade:On the 14th Day of Christmas ...

The following annotated lists were originally submitted to our local paper. The Best Holiday Movies appeared as a simple list with other contributors'; the Worst Holiday Movies list was not, I believe, ever published--I'm not always sure, since I do not read them in the paper, but just email them off. It's an odd arrangement, one that I only appreciate when, for instance, I'm at the bank drive-thru and the cashier recognizes me from my picture in the paper, or when I hear second-hand from my wife that someone likes the picks. Hence, "sheer egoism"--as Orwell puts it, listing the motives for writing--is satisfied without my poring over the actual printed version, scrap-booking it for those long winter nights or whatever.

In any case, here are my favorite ones, with notes added for this version:

It's a Wonderful Life As I wrote last year, the top of the heap: familiar and scary, heartwarming and edgy. A strange brew, suitable for sipping before the crackling fire--even if you don't have one.

A Christmas Story A close second (the others are not in any particular order), with enough repeated viewings by now that one can sing along, as it were, from verse to verse.

Miracle on 34th St. (1947 version) No better Santa than Edmund Gwenn. And Natalie Wood scowls perfectly, until the truth of Christmas sets her free. The movie doesn't talk down to her, but convinces in joyful increments.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (TV version) Dr. Suess' signature style (crowded twirls and precarious topographies) filtered through Chuck Jones' signature style (perched silhouettes and delicate eyelashes), with Boris Karloff adding just the right note of semi-campy bah-humbug-ness.

A Charlie Brown Christmas Like A Christmas Story's permeating Jean Shepherd references, this one is packed with in-jokes for fans of Schulz--and with some true-blue late-'60s "commercialism"-bashing, plus some straightforward religion in the middle.

Holiday Inn Its race-consciousness is typically confused--Bing Crosby's black housekeeper profit-shares in the Holiday Inn while Bing does Lincoln's Birthday in blackface--but the Christmas and New Year's segments are postcard-perfect evocations of middle-class ideals. A nostalgia-piece set to (gratifyingly familiar) music.

Joyeux Noel A new favorite from 2005. Recounting the moment when Scottish, French and German soldiers emerged from their respective foxholes to spend Christmas together--and then catch hell for it later from their respective superiors--this movie allows you to wallow guilt-free in poignancy and aching sentiment--because it all happened, and one can let life break one's heart with joy and pity every once in a while. At least once a year.

A Christmas Carol (1951) Like Miracle on 34th St.'s Gwenn, this version soars with its lead. Alastair Sim's Scrooge is a sight to behold: He giggles--in both despair and uncontained glee--with such force that I cannot help giggling along with him, feeling my own feet hanging on the constant brink of Scrooge's losses. Sim makes Scrooge not an anomaly but ourselves, as ready to blame the past to excuse our present--and ruin our future. And just as ready, one hopes, to share our way out of doom.

The Nightmare Before Christmas OK, so it's just as much--maybe more--a Halloween movie (my middle daughter did watch it October 31). But just when I'm ready to suffocate beneath Christmas fluff, Tim Burton and Henry Selick toss a shrunken head in our laps, until ho-ho-ho and boo! sound happily alike.

The Homecoming I have not seen this for many years, but you wouldn't even be interested in this kind of list if you didn't agree with me that the Waltons knew how to be, well, the Waltons. And this Waltons' Christmas is as good as the '70s '30s-craze gets.

The paper also asked for the 3 Worst Holiday Movies. I avoided most recent big-budget ones for the true non-believers:

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) Almost too easy: goofy B-movie camp? Don't get your hopes up. It's a generally flat, slightly queasy attempt at a "spoof." Pia Zadora’s film debut, if that matters any more.

Eight Crazy Nights (2002) Punch-Drunk Love is Adam Sandler's best movie because it offers reasons to feel sorry for someone so damaged all he can manage is contempt, which is what Sandler seems to feel for his audience. Why else would he insist we share his obsession with anything that can be spewed out of bodily orifices, including heartless words? Somewhere in this sticky mess is Hanukah, the poor thing.

It Happened One Christmas (1977) Not a charitable pick, because it really isn't a "bad" movie, just a redundant one. Marlo Thomas' charms aside, there is no need to re-make It's a Wonderful Life, one of the best Holiday movies of all time. But that's for another list. [See above.]

I am now finished with painfully long-gone holidays. And please believe me: I'm happier about it than you are.

146. Halloween Roundup (13-20): Done to Death

I have about another week of new-year energy left, and I've decided I simply cannot expend it by writing individual postings for horror films I saw two months ago. (Gee, what a rash decision.) But the Roundup will have its way with me, and so I will round it up all at once, right now:

13. Cronos (1993) Guillermo del Toro has a certain fearlessness to him. This may be due to his Latino verve (cultural stereotype #1) or comic-book-geek sensibility (cultural stereotype #2) or simply his big but nervous heart; in any case, his movies do not hesitate from, as Dr. Johnson might put it (metaphysically speaking), "the most heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together." Consider the tenderness between the grandfather and granddaughter--while the former becomes a vampire and the latter empties her toy chest for his repose. And the ubiquitous Ron Perlman, forever since Quest for Fire part simian, part comic menace. And at the center of this the Cronos Device itself, as beautiful and horrible a mechanism as Gothicism has ever concocted. A glimpse into the "Pan's labyrinth" of del Toro's authentically outre mind.

14. Brides of Dracula (1960) Terence Fisher in ripe, Freudian form. The lasting image for me is the dark-haired Bride, for many years merely a still in Carlos Clarens' Illustrated History of the Horror Film, a truly delirious Terrible Teeny-Bopper on whom I had a troubling crush. Oh, the damage done by Hammer.

15. Ju-on: The Grudge (2003) I will forever insist that lovers of J-Horror need to look closely at Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1964), particularly its high-contrast colors and deep shadows, as well as its silent approaches and creeping pans, its left-handed framing--what is that in the corner? one wonders--and quick-cuts to the last thing you want, but have to take. Ju-on has learned those lessons, and added aural layers to Kobayashi's love of whispering wind and high-pitched keening.

16. Shaun of the Dead (2004) How does a movie filled with gore manage to make one grin without a grimace? Well, those cute British accents help, but what really works here is the matter-of-fact approach everyone takes: twentysomethings encounter zombies--sorry; not supposed to use "the zed-word"--and take advantage of the flesh-eaters' incredibly slow gait to make leisurely escapes, engage in lengthy conversations, enjoy a pint, all with time to spare for devising half-formed plans for survival, which are swept away by sheer military force. Plenty of bullets to go around, after all. Like Young Frankenstein, Shaun loves its source material enough to understand the proper way to spoof it.

17. The Other (1972) In his "User Comments" on the Internet Movie Database, one Keith Anderson writes, "[this movie] has haunted me for about 28 years now. I was 13 or 14 when I happened to catch it in its original theatrical run in 1972. For me, it's become one of those rare discoveries that truly feels [sic] like something of my own." Very strange; I was about the same age, and admit to similar feelings. Watching it again, it seemed less magical--although it retains its Bradbury-esque qualities--but remains a private screening, a hidden twin deep in the barn. In some ways built simply on a gimmick, The Other still manages to evoke a unique sense of nostalgic dread. Like Carnival of Souls, this is a movie that understands itself, and refuses to speak in other than its own voice.

18. The Changeling (1980) I know I've written about this before--I think--but I'm too tired or whatever to hunt around for it. Suffice to say it is a yearly Roundup entry. Best horrifying bouncing ball EVER! OK, so I checked: I mentioned it in an unpublished newspaper Best-Of list: Scariest Movie Moments or something, in which I wrote, "A small and innocent thing becomes a source of dread." True enough, despite the enormous hulk of George C. Scott puffing and glaring through it all. Still a tough (American) ghost movie to beat.

19. The Black Cat (1934) This is so fraught with amour fou I feel as though I've seen it many times, beginning in childhood. But I know it's only been twice, and in the last three years. Edgar G. Ulmer's '30s masterpiece, a dark fable in which Art Deco never looked so deco-dent.

20. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) Our one guest at the Roundup viewing of this movie was a nice young woman from work who seemed a lot less flustered that she was watching it than I was having her watch it. I kept apologizing to her, while Tobe Hooper carved the roughest Jack-o'-Lantern of the Roundup. I had forgotten the last twenty minutes is composed of uninterrupted screaming. People from two rooms away waited with uneasy patience for it to be done with. It still bludgeons; to be honest, I'm not sure I can watch it again.

Well, I'm sure I've left out one or two, but the id-lid must come down, kiddies, and the year must renew itself. My middle daughter wants to watch what one--maybe me--would consider the greatest films of all time, and I hope we can see all 10,000 or so of them. In the meantime a tentative list of what might be our first ten:

A Hard Day's Night
North by Northwest
Jules et Jim
House of Games
It's a Gift
Sweet Smell of Success
8 1/2
Full Metal Jacket
Ikiru
Bonnie and Clyde

As usual, I'm aiming for a foolish inconsistency, the hobgoblin of expansive minds.

145. Prime

When The Godfather was released, I resented its insistence that it understood Sicilians. My father was Sicilian, and I knew a lot of Italian guys in my high school; some of them were junior goodfellas, and I felt a somehow adolescent irritation with the way they identified with the Corleones. I admit I was filled with an indignation that wasn't sure what it was indignant about; what I do recall was how satisfied I was--smug? oh, I hope not--with the awful descent Michael undergoes in Godfather II; something in me wanted to punish all those Sicilians. Maybe it was because a few of those guys in my high school were smug themselves, casual bullies who had it all figured out. And I didn't want them to be at the table on Sundays, where my father's parents fed us with expected excess. It was a world in which two helpings were barely eating, and three barely enough to convince Grandmom she didn't have to shout Mangia!--and I'll admit it; she really did that, like a Mama mia in a bad movie. And OK, Basta pasta! we cousins would yell, not really knowing any Italian but pleased with the rhyme. This wasn't a movie, though, just Sunday. But by the mid-'70s those helpings were dwindling, as Grandpop died and the family began to drift away from each other. I seemed to be losing my Sicilian-ness just as every other ticketholder in America was discovering/inventing its own.

So was my irritation with the Godfather cult a form of mourning, or the simple need to maintain a hold on a simple claim: the way my father's side of the family lived? I guess I felt that Coppola was stealing a little something and giving it to those potato-heads who thought it was cool to be Italian--when all it should've been was who they were, not an instant movie moment. These were not the best combination of half-thoughts and impulses for careful film-watching; I'm surprised I could stand the two Godfathers.

By 1976, though, something good had happened: I was two years out of high school; and, like those South Park guys mention in Bowling for Columbine, it's amazing how quickly high school falls off your shoulders. Besides, at twenty I was a bit--just a bit--less confused than at fourteen, and able to move outside the constricting circle of psuedo-goombahs with too much money and not enough brains. In fact, I found myself completely understanding Rocky--and now that I think of it, thirty years later and having just seen Rocky Balboa, maybe Stallone gave me an Italian I understood: Not a phony winner, all wing collar and sneer, but a more hesitant variety of knuckle-breaker, as ready to call pet birds "flying candy" as to shout with bitter hope, "I had no prime! I had nothin'!" Rocky filled me with joy despite myself, because there I was, still trying to figure out if movies were art or pure satisfaction--and how bad are things in your head when those two seem mutually exclusive?--and I saw in Rocky a chance to enjoy the movies without sacrificing anything. It was written and acted with a startling tenderness and excess, unafraid to be sentimental but unwilling to deny its characters their uncontrollable desires. Just consider the always-dangerous Burt Young. Stallone seems to know exactly what to do with him, this wild hair who always frightens me a little; you're never sure what Young might do: hit the other actor, or start to cry, or sing a song, or just walk off and wander into another movie. But in Rocky and Rocky Balboa he is at home, another palooka refusing to go down.

And so, protective of the delicate/brutal balance of Rocky in my head, I was unsure whether to see the new picture. Those campy sequels are emabarrassing--anyone who likes them does so because they get to laugh at them while, for instance, insisting Mr. T is awwwwwe-some; I didn't want one last smudge on my memory of 1976. But Rocky Balboa pulls off a neat trick--more like breathes a final relieved sigh--as it erases all memory of those sequels and reaches back and clamps onto the first picture with love and joy--and sorrow and regret--and makes me a present of, if not the best picture of the year, my favorite one, a brick wall of a movie that never lets itself look foolish, and keeps itself alive with enough self-deprecation to soften the blow of Stallone's patented uplift. But even that, the Bill Conti fanfare of Rocky-ism, sounds clear and unashamed. When Rocky tells his son, "It ain't how hard you hit; it's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward," I heard Stallone explaining most of himself--as well as Rocky--without an easy out. And as Rocky leaves the ring, turning his back on it--to face the crowd--I was reminded that, while the past does follow you, you can stop looking over your shoulder, at least long enough to raise your arm in both hail and farewell, and visit your Adrian's grave to recognize how solid you can make yourself, despite time and lost favor.

144. Orphans in the Storm

I've been away--Christmas-time at my house is full and grinning, like Dickens' second Ghost--and maybe with those scary children clinging to its ankles; but we're too busy cooking and making music and grading papers and getting it all done so we can do it* to notice our Ignorance and Want. All we see is light and expectation. Then we get sick--this year, a stomach flu coursing like reindeer for twenty-four hours straight through us, no waiting (and I cannot resist: all things must pass)--then bang! it's gone and we're hungry again, but never again for what we ate at Christmas. (Without a keen--and forgiving--sense of irony, one can neither believe in nor put up with God and His little jokes.) But I'm back again, just for a word or two, then gone for a few days. I think.

I'm finally getting the true grownup present--you know, the good feeling of giving things to other people; that gift, and no kidding. But I am also blessed with children who know me well, and one gave me a remarkable Springsteen book, more like a museum installment, packed with photos and removable inserts and reproductions of tickets and backstage passes and programs. A Compleatist Fan's scrapbook. And another gave me Tom Waits' Orphans, three dreamy, spinning discs of "Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards." And listening to them--some "Bastards" first, now "Bawlers"--led me here, ruminative at the tail-end of the year, with James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein suddenly now, if I can say it, the same. You may not agree that we are all guilty of everything--and I'll admit that sometimes I'm not sure what Dostoyevsky and I mean by that assertion of not-so-original sin--and you may yourself assert that one should not derive moral equivalencies too hastily, but some equivalencies are more equivalent than others, and looking back over the past few queasy days I'm not sure if I see Soul Brother Number One's white-horse ride to the Apollo, or hear Ford's artillery, or Saddam's--what? I didn't wait around to see if they really would air his execution--CNN and Fox were both promising it, there in the watches of the blue-glow TV night; all I have in my head are those wide-eyed shots of him, looking a bit perplexed, a bit angry, sometimes with his (rueful? exasperated?) hand alongside his cheek, an opposite-number Jack Benny--to be or not to be, with a (literal) vengeance--almost as if he were unsure exactly what all the fuss was about: After all, God is great, and what can happen as long as the cameras are rolling?

So here I am, driven by the sentimental confluence of Waits' growl and the flu and other ailment recoveries and onsets while the year wanes and the Way of All Flesh works its lasting charms on the good, the bad, and the ugly. Tom just sang, "There's somethin' to be said for sayin' nothin' at all." An easy exit cue, one I'm willing to follow, "down there by the train." Happy New Year, then; one more swift digit further up the twenty-first century.

---

*And OK, watching movies; but kiddies, I gotta finish the Halloween Roundup (and imagine that: You had simply to read those words; I had to write them) before I can parade through the Christmas Cavalcade.